So what makes gaming so good? It’s when a game gets more and more close and more and more intense, and then you just end up winning from an inch. Having the joy to experience such a moment requires the right players, the right game…but most of the time you also need to play long enough to bring such a moment to life, and play a lot of matches.

That’s why what we want to achieve here is the ability to group multiple matches in a single event. We’ve bring this concept in Score Maniac but honestly I think we screwed it up. It is not clearly explained and you probably need to be the developer to understand how it works.

Nevertheless, we are not desperate to make it right. We want to build that feature because we really want to see the who won the most matches in a single night, a weekend or in a year. There are a ton of different ways to build the feature. The idea we have at the moment would be to create events like intelligent playlists for those familiar with iTunes, based on filters.

So you could create an event like this:

The event was played on Starcraft 2

The event took place between the 1st and the 3rd of June

Here is how we create an event:

Dominion event creation

And here is the view of the event:

Dominion event view

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One of the things we want to get right is usability. We’ve had some bad experiences by handling over the app to some people and ask them to note the scores of a game: “What do I do?”, “How do I do…” ? No more!

One of the things we were not really fond of was the space use when playing with just two or three players. The screen feels empty. When playing with a lot of player, it’s complicated to have a different kind of view, but for two players we think we could do things a bit differently.

Also, as you saw in the previous post, we want to add some cool sharing content. So we can mix those things into the following:

I really like the fact that adding a round will add a line in the view. Unfortunately, for more than two players I’m afraid the view would quickly get ugly with people with long names, so we would have the more traditional view. Here is what we could have, with examples of the different kind of scoring available.

Here are some early ideas. Tell us what you think! You can contact us directly at hello@staxriver.com.

We have experienced a few times friends asking the results of a game, and Score Maniac actually does that. We do send results by mail, in text. This is cool, but not a breeze to look at. We want to push to users great visuals that are really cool to view.

We intend to have two kinds of shareable content: matches with a single round, and matches with multiple rounds.

Four years ago, Razmig, one of the two halves of Stax River, started to code his first iOS application. He wanted to keep the scores of all the games he played at the time. At that time, we were playing Mario Kart Wii a lot, and most games were really close. We kept thinking who was the best and obviously nobody had an honest answer for it. Time passed by, I’m not so sure how things go exactly but the app got forgotten, even though the idea was great.

Three years later, we created our own company, Stax River, and Poker Analytics, our first app, was on the market. We were thinking about what we wanted to build next. The idea of an app that kept track of games scores came back, we really wanted to rebuild the app created some time ago.

We wandered a bit on our way to build the app, building features we would later throw away, but we finally released the app in June of last year. The success has really not been there. The app is a real pain to discover, and we’ve been occupied with other projects so we haven’t spent enough time to market the app properly.

Now we are one year later, and Nintendo has just released Mario Kart 8! We’ve been playing our traditional 16 races, and it’s been a blast! The new gameplay is pretty cool, the new items are awesome but I’m not so happy with the new tracks. Anyway, after playing a full weekend we are ready to prepare the future of Score Maniac! So we have a bunch of ideas for the app, and we are going to use this blog to expose them. We really count on you to engage with us, by commenting our posts and subscribing to the mailing list if you are interested.